Uma Thurman biography

Uma Thurman was born in Boston, but she was raised in such far-flung locales as India (during grade school), Amherst, Massachusetts, and Woodstock, New York. Her father was the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk (he is currently chairman of the religion department at Columbia University) and her mother is a psychotherapist who was briefly married to psychedelic guru Timothy Leary. All four of the Thurman children are named for Hindu deities; "Uma" translates into "bestower of blessings").

A little ill-at-ease amongst her peers because of her unconventional name and upbringing, at 15 Thurman left school to move to New York City. Once in the Big Apple, she supported herself by washing dishes and by modeling—as her mother had done years before when she was fresh off the boat from Sweden.

A year later, Thurman got her first film gig as a young vamp who seduces men to rob them in the low-budget thriller, Kiss Daddy Good Night (1987). She was the only one to escape the film with a favorable notice. It was the role she played at 18 as the convent-sheltered naïf seduced out of her corset by John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) that catapulted her into fame.

"That showing part of the human body would have such an overwhelming effect and be the cause of such insane media amazed me," she remembers about Dangerous Liaisons. "It was a shocking thing to be ripped out of my innocence and suddenly put up as some kind of hot thing that had absolutely no translation for me in my vernacular whatever. It sort of stunned me."

Once married to fellow actor Gary Oldman for a brief time, Thurman married actor Ethan Hawke May 1, 1998, whom she became involved with during filming of the 1997 futuristic thriller Gattaca. The couple have a daughter, Maya Ray, born July 8, 1998 and a son Roan, born January 15, 2002, but they were divorced after it was reported that Hawke cheated with a Canadian model while he was in Montreal filming.

As for how Uma perceives herself, she says, "People probably get their coffee from a waitress every morning that's better-looking than I am. But I'm on the movie screen, so I'm there to be fantad about."